Education Commons^™

Exploiting A Grading Policy Shift As An Instrument To Estimate Impact Of Grading On Teacher Evaluations, Gavin Johnson

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Professors at a university plausibly have an incentive to give higher grades to students, and these higher grades will be reflected in student evaluations, which are used to assess teaching quality, which could have career impacts. This paper takes advantage of a policy shift at the business school at Utah State University that introduced suggested caps on the average course grades that teachers gave. This allowed instrumental variable analysis to correct for bias in OLS estimations of these impacts. The correlation between grades and students' evaluations of teachers was found to be positive suggesting that student evaluations of teachers are …

Assessing Achievement On A First-Grade Economics Course Of Study, A. Guy Larkins

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Problem

Despite the surge of interest in economic education in the elementary school in the last two decades, there have been very few attempts to assess the ability of young children to learn economic concepts. In the primary grades, this problem is compounded by the difficulty of measuring knowledge in six and seven year old children.

Objectives

The primary objective of this dissertation was to determine whether first-grade children can learn the basic concepts in Our Working World: Families at Work. Since instruments suitable for assessing achievement on Families at Work were not available when this study was initiated, …